Tag: Fungi on heathlands

Bramshott fungi walk – October 2023

Daniel Greenwood3 Comments

Bramshott, Hampshire, October 2023

On Saturday 21st October I led a fungi walk in the Bramshott area for the South Downs National Park’s Heathlands Reunited project. Thanks to Olivia and Dan for setting the walk and guiding us on the day.

It was a chilly and showery day with breaks of sunshine to light up the birch and bracken.

Autumn had crashed in with its typical rain and leaf fall. I think the early mushroom season has been shortened by the hot September and sudden shift to seasonal storms. Just a thought.

Sulphur tuft was one of the first mushrooms encountered, among a whole load of small grey/brown mushrooms that I wasn’t able to ID on the spot.

This looks to me like one of the grey spotted amanitas but after a bit of a downpour.

This is very probably a blusher, amanita rubescens. You can see a slight pink hue at this premature stage.

Fly agarics were slow to show but when the walk passed through grassy open woodland, they abounded. This one was almost like a russula with its typical white veil remnants

Amanita citrina, the false deathcap, was one of the most common mushrooms on the walk. It was abundant in the areas of beech woodland and also the open, grassy birch and oak woodland.

I’m not sure which waxcap this is, but heath waxcap, Gliophorus laetus, would make sense because it’s a waxcap on a heath!

This was one of the few red russulas, though there were tens of different-coloured varieties along the way. Sometimes the only mushroom around was a russula.

This was a very large mushroom under an oak tree. I’ve not seen this species before but am leaning towards an ID of giant funnel, Aspropaxillus giganteus.

My guess here is that this is bleeding oak crust, Stereum gausapatum.

The only cep, Boletus edulis, in the whole area. I think most of these have been picked for the pot already by other visitors.

This nicely shows the change that occurs in blackening waxcap, Hygrocybe conica. It looks like a jelly sweet to begin with then becoming rather liquorice.

One picture that sums up the status of this wooded heath – an empty blank bullet casing underneath sulphur tuft.

Thanks for reading.

Fungi walk at Bramshott Common – 21st Oct 2023

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

I’m pleased to be leading a fungi walk with the Heathlands Reunited team in the South Downs National Park this October:

Date/time: Saturday 21st October 2023, 11am

Location: Bramshott Common, Hampshire (near Haslemere)

Bramshott is in Hampshire, close to the border with Surrey and not far from West Sussex.

You can book a ticket (£3 admin charge) via Eventbrite.

I posted about Bramshott Common last year:

Basketful of Boletes

Earpick fungus in Hampshire

This walk will be a good way to learn about the common species of fungi in woodlands, their ecology and cultural significance. Though we won’t be picking mushrooms to eat, there will be some guidance around edibility generally as a safety guide. This is a great site for fungi with a lot of the ‘big-hitters’ and other unusual species to be found.

Thanks for reading.

Fungi

Earpick fungus in Hampshire 👂

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

Here’s an account of the final fungi walk of my calendar for 2022. It was held on Saturday 19th November on the birch and pine heaths of Bramshott Common, where Hampshire and Surrey cross paths. West Sussex isn’t far away either. It’s an area that is arguably Wealden in character, but inside the South Downs National Park.

I wasn’t able to take any photos during the walk, other than the header image (not visible in email). For a better account of the fungal communities at Bramshott Common, please see my blog from a couple of months ago.

Back in October this Ministry of Defence site contained basketfuls of mushrooms. On 19th November however, they had all gone on holiday. Where fly agarics had previously flung themselves onto paths, only one could be found across the entire walk, tucked away behind a heather shrub. Interestingly, I had been speaking to the person who did find it, moments earlier. She had grown up in Sweden and spoke about how as a child she was taught about mushrooms in school. This heathy, birchy, piney landscape must have been similar to landscapes she knew from Sweden.

The brown birch bolete parties of the previous visit had dwindled to the last man standing, spotted somehow among the identical shades of fallen birch leaves on the ground. As my scouse family says, well in that lad.

Cassius V. Stevani, IQ-USP, Brazil, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My personal highlight of the walk was when an attendee found a small bonnet-like mushroom among the leaves. I picked up the pine cone it was growing from. The spindly bonnet slumped, but it seemed to have bioluminescence. The one we saw is not the same species as the one in the image above (Mycena luxaeterna) which is found in rainforest in Brazil, but it had a glow and was a bonnet so that’s not too far off.

Does anyone out there know this magical bonnet mushroom in a European context?

Anyway, holding the pine cone up to show off the glow-in-the-dark mushlette – let’s call it that – I mentioned earpick fungus to the group, a species I had only seen once before that is found on pine cones. Looking at the cone again I noticed a small antenna poking up from the cone’s segments. It was earpick fungus! I wish I could have taken a photo with my macro kit but it wasn’t possible. I was surprised by how small and difficult to see the fungus was, only really spotted because it was so close to my face.

As I’ve said previously this autumn: visualise the mushrooms you want to see in the world. Sometimes it works out well.

Big thanks to Olivia and Dan from the South Downs National Park’s Heathlands Reunited project for putting on the walk, and to all the lovely people who came along and made it worthwhile!

Thanks for reading.

Fungi | South Downs

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A basketful of boletes 🧺

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

As seen on Friday 14th October 2022

In mid-October I met up with the Heathlands Reunited team at a Hampshire heathland in the Surrey borders. The meeting was to scope out a fungi walk I will be leading with them next month, and I thought it would be worth sharing some of the sightings. They will no doubt differ next month when autumn is well and truly progressing towards winter.

Very early on we found a perfect scarletina bolete (Neoboletus luridiformis)! This is one of my favourite species, having only seen one once before, on chalk on the South Downs Way in 2019.

Elsewhere in the bolete family, there were loads of brown birch boletes (Leccinum scabrum), most of which were in very good condition. Bramshott is a heathland so there’s a lot of birch there.

There were also plenty of Boletus edulis but they seemed to be mostly covered in mould after recent rain. This part of the Weald and Downs is quite misty and damp at times, so the mushrooms were probably quickly affected by the conditions.

There were lots of these red mushrooms that you may have heard of before. They’re enjoying a good year.

Other amanitas found that afternoon include what is either panther cap or grey-spotted amanita.

Less spotty amanitas included the highest numbers of tawny grisette mushrooms (Amanita fulva) I’ve ever encountered.

This grisette had fallen over. At the base you can see the ‘egg’ the fruiting body emerges from.

Along with those amanitas, the most common mushroom by a long, long way was the brown rollrim (Paxillus involutus). This is a poisonous mushroom which seems to be having a very good year.

Here’s a closer look at one of those grizzly bears. I first saw this mushroom when attending a walk from someone who taught me a lot – David Warwick – in Nunhead in SE London. He pulled what looked like a piece of rubbish from an old tree pit, what turned out to be the brown roll rim. I’ll never forget it!

As mentioned previously this season, the russulas are having a strong year. These lovely yellow ones, were appearing afresh from under the pines and birch. You can see a collapsed amanita in the background.

I have considered whether to try and spend more time learning to identify russulas. My focus is on learning families rather than getting obscure fungi down to species level. I am not completely a scientist in this and my aim is to produce photographs and write these blogs. It becomes all about how much time is available to you and what the best use of that time is.

As we finished scouting the route for the walk, we bumped into a group of women who were picking mushrooms. They had a woven basket full to the brim. From what I could make out they had picked a lot of honey fungus, ceps, a scarletina bolete and one of the leccinum boletes. We got talking to them and discovered they were Polish – I can speak a little bit, which I deployed here, always received very warmly! – and the woman in charge really knew her stuff. She said she was going to pickle them in olive oil and was happy with the slug-bitten state of that cep you can see on the lefthand-side.

I’ve written before about the place mushrooms have in historically ‘Slavic’ countries such as Poland. This is not something you would often see in England, nor to encounter someone with the level of confidence in their knowledge. Of course no nation of people can be generalised or defined in any one way but the English culture has become one of mycophobia.

If anything is to be said in riposte to that, it’s that the level of interest and intrigue in fungi in England is growing. We were here to plan a route for a public fungi walk, after all!

Thanks for reading.

Further reading: Fungi

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